In March 1991, Random House published The Seeker’s Handbook – The Complete Guide to Spiritual Pathfinding (TSH). The book was carefully timed to serve the need it defined, a need I identified in the social-spiritual trends of that moment: namely, the need for orientation to, and clarification of, the options presented in the New Age movement (NAM), loosely known as alternative spirituality.

The dawn of the 1990s saw that movement peaking. My intention with this book was to offer a pathfinding tool, something like an intellectual compass for navigating through the huge array of books, teachers, programs, and practices that had been proliferating massively since the 1960s.

To that end, I proposed the metaphor of the labyrinth to describe the multiple winding pathways facing modern truth-seekers. I also suggested that in our time, due to the very multiplicity of options for spiritual development – everything from Baha’i to Buddhism to body work, from alchemy to zen – the task of pathfinding itself becomes an art. Sorting out what principle, program, or person you are going to follow in undertaking a spiritual practice to guide your life is on its own terms a challenging practice, regardless of which practice you finally adopt! This observation is as true now, I would say, as it was when I wrote the book.